bearshttp://www.readthehook.com/taxonomy/term/1506/all
enBear Witness: Jackson Landers learns first hand that Virginia is bear central— and they taste goodhttp://www.readthehook.com/109955/bears-jackson-landers-learns-first-hand-virginias-bear-central-and-they-taste-good
<p><strong>By Jackson Landers</strong></p>
<p>The growl of my truck engine rose an octave as I shifted gears to climb a hill and then began making my way around a bend. The twisty road in the woods of Central Virginia was dappled with late-afternoon sunlight. My mind was on what I would make for dinner— I wondered whether I had any sour cream— until I came around the bend and saw an SUV stopped in the middle of the road. I slammed on my brakes and squealed to a stop.</p>
<p>Moments before I arrived on the scene, the SUV’s driver’s plans for the day had been interrupted by a black bear trotting out in front of her vehicle. She’d hit the bear, wrecking the front end of her SUV in the process. Another vehicle had immediately also clipped the bear, and now all three of us were out of our cars, trying to sort the situation out. The bear and the SUV were the only casualties.</p>
<p>I’m a professional hunting guide, so my first concern was for the bear, which lay dying on its side in the middle of the road. It was struggling to get up with its front paws, but its back legs were clearly paralyzed, and there was no hope for the animal. I put down several wounded deer by the side of the road each year, but I had neglected to stash a spare rifle in my truck that morning. I did, however, have a very large hunting knife. A quick jab in the heart ended the animal’s suffering.</p>
<p>I dragged the bear out of the road so traffic could start moving again, and then I waited for the police to arrive in order to obtain permission to keep the bear. (Being in possession of a dead bear outside of bear-hunting season can get you charged with poaching unless you get special approval.) I had realized that this was as perfect an opportunity as I would ever have to find out what bear meat tastes like.</p>
<p>Disassembling a 150-pound dead bear wasn’t what I’d had planned for the evening (I’d intended to catch up on <em>The Walking Dead</em>), but I’m a <em>carpe diem</em> kind of guy. An hour later I found myself the proud, legal owner of one dead black bear.<br />Now what?</p>
<p>Black bears look like a cross between humans and big, silly dogs. The idea of eating one had always seemed just shy of cannibalism to me. I hunt deer regularly for food, but I had never eaten–– let alone butchered–– a bear. But is there any good reason the bear should be a sacred cow? Especially a bear that was already dead? There was nothing unethical about eating an animal in this situation, except maybe by the very strictest vegan standards. It wasn’t moral revulsion that I had to get over, exactly–– it was more like neophobia. However, as a hunter and writer specializing in killing and eating invasive species (a great way to eat sustainably and help the ecosystem at the same time), I’ve had to force myself to get over hang-ups about food on many occasions.<br /><br />Spotting a black bear in the wild is a Facebook-worthy event in Central Virginia. You could live here for your whole life without ever seeing one, yet black bears have almost certainly seen you. Virginia has a population of about 17,000 black bears with some areas of the state supporting one bear for every square mile. Contrast this with our northern neighbor, Maryland, which holds about 600 bears in the entire state. By modern standards, Virginia has a whole lot of bears. Virginia has bears like some places have deer.<br /><br />It wasn’t always this way. Bears were hunted and commercially trapped with few limits or regulations into the early twentieth century. A conservation movement led by Theodore Roosevelt’s Boone and Crockett Club lobbied for legal limits on hunting and for the protection of habitat from development. Bears were scarce in Virginia by the time protections were put into place. Restricted to a few isolated remnant populations, they had just barely been saved by hunters from hunters.<br /><br />With hunting regulations finally based on science rather than commerce, Virginia’s bears increased steadily through the twentieth century until they began to explode in the 1980’s. Today we have high numbers of bears everywhere in Virginia except the Northern Neck. For the last decade, Albemarle County has consistently been one of the top counties producing the most black bears during hunting seasons.<br /><br />Our growing population of black bears has made encounters increasingly common. On July 24th, a woman in Greene County who asked her name be withheld due to legal concerns over a bear shooting witnessed the aftermath of a bear’s raid on her fenced chicken lot.<br /><br />“We had 12 chickens in a fully enclosed lot, and we came home in the middle of the day and all of our chickens were dead," the woman recalls.</p>
<p>Having ripped open the fence, the bear was reaching for the feathered fowl and fell in, then went on an ersine killing spree before making his escape. The family hadn't seen the last of him.</p>
<p>"The next day he had come back and we actually saw him back in the chicken lot, trying to get out,” the woman says.<br /><br />But it didn’t end there. The following day, the problem bear returned a third time, surprising the woman’s father-in-law as he walked with her children near the house. Uncharacteristically for a black bear, according to the woman, the animal came straight for them. The man drew a .25 ACP pistol that he was carrying due to the bear’s visits and fired at the bear, which turned and ran out of sight.<br /><br />Fortunately for those of us here in Bear Central, aka Central Virginia, aggressive behavior by black bears is unusual. Typically, even a mother with cubs will leave the area at the first sight or scent of humans in the area. Wild bears prefer wild food, but bears that rank lower on the pecking order get pushed out of prime habitat and need to seek less-preferred food sources out of trash cans, bird feeders, or chicken coops.<br /><br />Bears in Central Virginia tend to be healthy. Their only enemies are humans and the only disease that biologists tend to find among them is malnutrition (though there was one unusual case in Albemarle last year of a bear with rabies that attacked a couple of people before being killed). Bear meat from Central Virginia can be presumed safe to eat, but its best to cook the meat to 160 degrees just in case.<br /><br />The butchering of my own bear was easier than I had expected. With the exception of removing the paws, it wasn’t much different from working on a deer. The fur was longer and thicker, but the hide wasn’t much tougher. The bone structure of the lower limbs was radically different, though: The bones were much thicker, and they were surrounded by numerous broad sinews. Everything in those limbs communicated power–while also reminding me a bit of human anatomy. Within a few hours I had a fridge full of around 60 pounds of bear meat.</p>
<p>Now I had heard all sorts of stories from hunters about what bear meat is like: that it’s tough, gamey, and unpleasantly greasy. But in my experience eating a fairly wide array of unusual species, I had found that meat that tastes “tough and gamey” is more often a case of bad butchering and sloppy handling than an intrinsic quality of a species.</p>
<p>To maximize the potential flavor of my bear, I dry-aged it for a week before I started experimenting. Dry-aging meat, for the uninitiated, is the process of letting meat hang out for a while at cool temperatures while allowing moisture to evaporate from it. Dry-aging accomplishes two things. First, natural enzymes in the meat begin to tenderize it by breaking down the collagen in the muscles. (Collagen is what makes tough meat feel tough, and more of it builds up in muscle tissue as an animal gets older.) Second, dry-aging allows water to evaporate out of a piece of meat, concentrating the flavor. High-end steakhouses all do this with their beef, and I have been dry-aging most of my venison in my fridge at home for years.</p>
<p>Once my bear was sufficiently dry-aged, the very first thing I tried was cutting some simple steaks out of a forequarter (the upper portions of the front legs) and from the backstraps (the cuts from alongside the spine that are referred to as “pork loin” in pigs). I wanted to keep the recipe simple so as not to hide the true flavor of the meat, but I also wanted to have some fun. So I just ran with the bear theme. I pan-seared the steaks in olive oil and drizzled just a bit of honey on them. A handful of blueberries went into the pan with them (bears love blueberries almost as much as they love honey, and tradition suggests seasoning wild game with it's favorite eats). Then I transferred the meat to a covered dish to finish cooking in the oven and deglazed the pan with a splash of Toasted Head cabernet sauvignon, which I had chosen on account of the wine’s label having a black bear on it. I made sure to cook the meat to 140 degrees and hold it there for a while, since bears, like pigs, can carry trichinosis.</p>
<p>My girlfriend and I sat down to eat our first bites of bear meat, drizzled with that red-wine pan sauce. The texture was good, and the backstrap cuts were a bit more tender than the forequarter cuts. The flavor was mild; it tasted more or less identical to venison—which is to say a lot like beef, only with less fat and a blander flavor. There was nothing greasy or tough about it. It looked like a thick piece of filet mignon. Between sips of the bear-bearing Toasted Head wine (which paired very nicely with the bear meat, I should add), we soon forgot that it was bear meat that we were eating. By the end of the meal, it was just dinner, no more exotic than the artichokes we served along with it.</p>
<p>Heartened, I started putting bear meat in everything. And once I began running it through the meat grinder, the stuff became a household staple. Think bear tacos, spaghetti with bear sauce, lime-marinated bear stir-fry served over ramen noodles.<br />Bear burgers in particular were a big hit. I mixed one egg with one pound of ground bear meat and just a touch of onion powder and pepper and broiled them under high heat. Three minutes per side seemed to get me up over 140 degrees every time, without taking the burgers beyond medium-rare. I invited some friends over to eat them, and the unanimous agreement was that they simply tasted like very good beef burgers and that nobody would ever guess they were bear.</p>
<p>I began to take the ground bear meat so much for granted that I confess to feeding it to a dinner guest in a ragout over angel hair pasta without thinking to tell her that she was eating bear as opposed to beef. She ate every bite. I’m still not sure whether I should tell her what she ate.</p>
<p>Lately I’ve found myself worrying about the dwindling supply of bear meat in my fridge and freezer. I have one whole hindquarter in my chest freezer awaiting a special bear dinner with a group of friends, but other than that and a pound or so of medallions, all I’ve got left is an array of very unusual bones that my dogs have been chewing on in the front yard. What will I do when I run out?</p>
<p>I’ve hesitated to take up bear-hunting in spite of the high numbers of black bears here in my home state of Virginia. As a dog owner, I’m disinclined to shoot them on account of their canine resemblance. But I realize that this is more about me than it is about the animal. Either I’ll have to get over my reluctance to actually hunt bears, or I should spend less time with my rifle in the woods and more time cruising for roadkill.</p>
<p>~</p>
<p class="p1">Jackson Landers is the author of <i>Eating Aliens: One Man's Adventures Hunting Invasive Animal Species. </i>He lives in Albemarle County. A version of this story was originally published on <a href="http://Slate.com/">Slate.com</a>.</p>
http://www.readthehook.com/109955/bears-jackson-landers-learns-first-hand-virginias-bear-central-and-they-taste-good#comments_BreakingNewsFeaturedbearsjackson landersCover StoriesMon, 05 Aug 2013 21:50:59 +0000Hook Contributor109955 at http://www.readthehook.comSo bears aren't always content with berries...http://www.readthehook.com/69626/so-bears-arent-always-content-berries
<p><a href="http://www.newsleader.com/article/20091102/NEWS01/91102014/-1/rss">Scary incident</a> of bear vs. a pair of 400-pound pigs in Augusta County. (The bear won.)</p>
http://www.readthehook.com/69626/so-bears-arent-always-content-berries#comments_BreakingNewsOutdoorsbearsTue, 03 Nov 2009 12:09:59 +0000hawes69626 at http://www.readthehook.com600-pound black bear: 'It sounded like it was tearing my arm off'http://www.readthehook.com/85446/cover-survivor-man-meets-600-pound-black-bear
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<p class="p1">It was just before dawn on Friday, November 17, and Thurman Hensley's life was about to change. Making his way over the rocky terrain and thick patches of mountain laurel of his 250-acre property bordering the Shenandoah National Park, the seasoned hunter and expert marksman tracked his prey.<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span></p>
<p class="p1">Then, at 8:30am, with the sun shining brightly on the cool fall day, Hensley finally spotted his mark. He raised his muzzle loader, took aim, and fired the gun's single round. Through the cloud of smoke, the 60-year-old saw the animal lurch as his bullet<strong> </strong>penetrated its torso behind the shoulder.</p>
<p class="p1">It could have been a fatal shot. But rather than fall, the massive creature lumbered off into the woods with Hensley close behind, determined to snare a prize kill and put the wounded animal out of its misery. An hour later, however, Hensley, now unarmed, found himself fighting for his own life, locked in a bloody battle to the death with Virginia's largest mammal.</p>
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<p>Thurman Hensley discusses the attack by a 600-pound bear.</p>
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<p class="p1"><strong>Bears ascending</strong></p>
<p class="p1">Five years ago, the resort community of Fallsburg, about an hour upstate from New York City, was rocked when when a vacationing toddler from Brooklyn was plucked from her stroller and killed by <em>Ursus americanus</em>, the American black bear. Attacks by black bears are rare&#8211; just 45 have been recorded since 1900. And according to the state's Department of Game and Inland Fisheries, Virginia&#8211; despite thousands of bears roaming its forests&#8211; has never recorded an unprovoked attack on a human.</p>
<p class="p1">Dave Steffan, the Department's forest wildlife program manager, says bears spend their time scavenging for nuts, berries, and insects&#8211; and also occasionally eating smaller woodland creatures. Calculations from the bear "harvest"&#8211; the number of bears killed each season&#8211; indicates that their numbers are rising. In 2005-2006, 1,439 bears were killed statewide; the number jumped to 1,633 this season.</p>
<p class="p1">The typical adult black bear weighs between 175 and 400 pounds, Steffan says. But there was nothing typical about the bear Hensley was tracking.</p>
<p class="p2">&nbsp;</p>
<p class="p1"><strong>Bear lovers, bear killers</strong></p>
<p class="p1">At first impression, Jennifer and Thurman Hensley are an unlikely pair. His home office features a gun safe, camouflage hunting garb, and countless orange caps. In the living room and kitchen, trophy heads from his hunts&#8211; bear, deer, elk, even a white mountain goat&#8211; hang from every wall along with dried skulls and bear paws.</p>
<p class="p1">She, however, sports a "That was Zen, this is Tao" bumper sticker on her PT Cruiser and teaches Taiji and Qigong&#8211; eastern movement and healing practices&#8211; from a studio inside the lodge style home the couple built nearly 30 years ago near the tiny town of Grottoes in northeast Augusta County. But Jennifer finds the couple's seemingly diverse interests quite compatible.</p>
<p class="p1">"Everything we do comes back to a love for nature," says Jennifer, who says that when they began dating in ninth grade, her future husband was supplementing income from his grocery store job by trapping animals for fur.<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp; </span>"We were deer hunting when JFK was shot," Jennifer recalls.<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span></p>
<p class="p1">"If I'm going to eat meat, I'm going to be responsible for where it comes from," she says. "We don't go to the store and buy hamburger. We have deer burger or bear burger."<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span></p>
<p class="p1">Mounting the trophies is a sign of respect for the animal's spirit and sacrifice, adds Jennifer, who says she has Native American ancestry. "I never enjoyed the kill," she explains: for the last several years she has entered the woods armed only with a camera.<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span></p>
<p class="p1">Thurman Hensley, however, is not apologetic or shy about his passion for all aspects of the sport. "I enjoy the kill," he says. "I won't ever say I don't, cause I do." And he admits that the trophies hanging in their house are a "boasting right." But he insists those admissions don't conflict with his respect for the animals he hunts, and he has nothing but disdain for people who hunt illegally. Hensley says he has spent countless hours over the last three decades creating a wildlife sanctuary on his property.<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span></p>
<p class="p1">Surrounded by woods, their home is a frequent stop-off for the animals that live around them, and the couple say they enjoy watching the bears during the year. They chuckle recalling cubs they've seen playing nearby and nosy bears they've shooed off their porch.<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span></p>
<p class="p1">When he noticed that bears were frequently being hit by cars on nearby Route 340, Hensley dug several ponds to provide the bears with water so they wouldn't have cross the road to reach a river. When he and Jennifer hear or see poachers on their property, they call the authorities immediately.</p>
<p class="p1">But one bear in particular caught Hensley's attention over the last several years: "the biggest bear I've ever seen," he says.<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span></p>
<p class="p1">"Not many people could hunt a bear like that," he explains. For three years he tracked the bear, hoping to bag it with a bow and arrow&#8211; his preferred hunting method. But although he spotted it on several occasions, he never had a clean shot. This year, although he saw 17 other bears during the season, he let them pass "'cause you only get one," he says.</p>
<p class="p1">Virginia law allows each hunter to take only one bear per season, and each carcass must be checked at an official station. (Laws prohibit hunters from shooting females accompanied by cubs, and all bears under than 100 pounds are also off limits.)</p>
<p class="p1">In addition to the challenge of hunting a big bear, Hensley had another reason for targeting this particular animal: safety.<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span></p>
<p class="p1">"This bear was not afraid of human beings," he says, recalling a staring match he had with the creature as it passed under a tree stand earlier this year before hunting season began.</p>
<p class="p1">"It had hate in its eyes," he says. "When that happens, you're in trouble, because the only thing that saves man from bear is that it's afraid of you."</p>
<p class="p1">Jennifer says something else set the stage for tragedy as well: "The bear had lost its fear, but Thurman had lost his fear of the bear."</p>
<p class="p1">And so when bow hunting season ended with no sign of the bear, Hensley decided to take his chances with his muzzle-loaded rifle.</p>
<p class="p2">&nbsp;</p>
<p class="p1"><strong>Tracking a wounded animal</strong></p>
<p class="p1">Like the guns carried by cartoon characters, a muzzle loader is an old-fashioned firearm, though most used today are not antiques. It must be loaded by hand with gunpowder and bullet. And after each shot,<strong> </strong>reloading can take up to a minute, a long time when the hunter suddenly becomes the hunted.</p>
<p class="p1">As Hensley began tracking the bear he had shot that November morning, another hunter was waiting and watching high above the ground. Soon after hearing the shot, he saw a sight that shocked him.</p>
<p class="p1">"A huge bear came by," recalls Tim Cass, Hensley's neighbor, who was hunting with his 19-year-old son, Nicholas, from a tree stand. "It looked like it was 800 pounds." Cass says that in addition to its unbelievable size, the bear was acting strangely. "It kept sitting down, laying, sitting," he says.<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span></p>
<p class="p1">Cass had already killed his one allotted bear for the season that morning, so he remained in his stand.</p>
<p class="p1">About 45 minutes later, Hensley came past, and Cass joined the pursuit, making their way through mountain laurel so thick that in places the trio had to crawl on their hands and knees before they spotted the wounded bear. "It was laid down," Cass says.<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span></p>
<p class="p1">Both he and Hensley fired their weapons, but even those shots didn't finish the job, and when the smoke cleared, the bear was gone. And so was their ammunition.</p>
<p class="p1">Both men had left their packs with extra ammo by their tree stands, so Cass used a radio to ask his son and his son-in-law, Curtis Barton, who were hunting nearby, to bring more. Re-armed, Hensley, Cass, and Barton continued the hunt. Nicholas, who'd lent his gun to his father, stayed behind.</p>
<p class="p1">There were signs that the bear wouldn't go far&#8211; "There was a lot of blood," Cass says&#8211; and before long, the hunters had another chance to kill the bear. Hensley, walking about 10 yards ahead of the other two, spotted the wounded animal lying in close range under some laurel, took aim, and shot it in the head. "The bear started rolling, moaning, roaring," Cass recalls.<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span></p>
<p class="p1">He and Barton also fired their weapons. One shot to the head might have killed an ordinary bear, but this creature's massive size afforded it some protection from the bullets, and game wardens later estimated the seven-foot-tall bear's weight at about 600 pounds. According to VDGIF spokesperson Julia Dixon, the largest black bear on record was 720 pounds and was shot in the Suffolk area. Jennifer believes Hensley's bear might have been closer to that size, but it was never weighed.<strong> </strong>And while a typical black bear carries an inch of fat under its skin, this bear had a full five inches of fat that absorbed much of the bullets' impact, say the hunters.</p>
<p class="p1">"That is above normal," says Steve Morgan, owner of Appleberry Mountain Taxidermy in Schuyler. He handles about 30 to 40 bear carcasses a year, most under 300 pounds. At a nearby bear check station, The Gun Shack in Verona, Jordan Coffman says he's never seen a bear that size. "The biggest bear we've weighed is 180 pounds," he says.<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span></p>
<p class="p1">More than three times that size, Hensley's target leapt out of the laurel. From 10 yards away, Cass says, he watched a "horrific" scene unfold. "When it came out, it spun to the right," he remembers. "Thurman was in the bear's path. It took its paws and laid him out, started chewing him from the feet up. He was screaming, 'Get it off me! Get if off me!'"</p>
<p class="p2">&nbsp;</p>
<p class="p1"><strong>Gentle giants</strong></p>
<p class="p1">The Game Department's Steffan says larger bears are not inherently more aggressive: "They don't get old and big unless they've figured out how to avoid people for their life."<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span></p>
<p class="p1">That, however, is not to say bears can't be dangerous. "They're big and strong," Steffan says, "and once they become habituated to humans, whatever fear they have naturally goes away. If they see people as a source of food, that's when we get concerned."</p>
<p class="p1">That became fatally apparent in a 2005 documentary, <em>Grizzly Man</em>, whose doomed protagonist Timothy Treadwell treats Alaskan grizzlies as his friends. The dangers of human-bear interaction became apparent last year at Maymont Park in Richmond when a four-year-old boy offered a treat through a fence. After one of the park's two black bear nipped him, Health Department officials controversially decided to euthanize both animals so their brains could be tested for rabies.</p>
<p class="p1">The affection many people feel for the reclusive animals led over 300 mourners to pack the bears' memorial service on February 25, 2006. "It feels like a Mafia hit," wrote <em>Times-Dispatch</em> columnist Ray McAllister.<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span></p>
<p class="p1">But despite their generally gentle natures and their "teddy bear" reputation, keeping the bear population in check is a necessity, says nature expert Marlene Condon, who points out that bears have no natural predators except humans.</p>
<p class="p1">And not all bear hunters abide by the rules. In 1999, Operation SOUP (Special Operation to Uncover Poaching) led to the arrests of 19 people around the Shenandoah National Park. Nine of them were charged with violating the Lacey Act, a federal law that prohibits the sale of wild animals' body parts. Sales of bear parts are particularly lucrative in Asia, where their gallbladders&#8211; considered an aphrodisiac&#8211; can fetch up to $1,000 per ounce, more than the price of cocaine. Approximately 300 galls were recovered during the 1999 operation, in addition to claws and furs. Another Virginia poaching sting, Operation VIPER, was operated out of a fake bear-checking station in Elkton and yielded more than 100 arrests for illegal bear harvesting in 2003-2004.</p>
<p class="p1">Part of the problem is that states have inconsistent laws, says Mike Markarian of the Humane Society of the United States. While it's illegal to sell any bear parts in Virginia, other states allow it, so Virginia bear parts can be smuggled over state lines to be sold. Some eventually make it onto the black market.<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span></p>
<p class="p1">Markarian says his organization is hoping the Bear Protection Act will be reintroduced and passed this year. That federal bill, which received bipartisan support in both the U.S. House and Senate in 2002, prohibits the import, export, and interstate commerce in bear gall bladders and bile.</p>
<p class="p2">&nbsp;</p>
<p class="p1"><strong>"Tearing my arm off"</strong></p>
<p class="p1">When Hensley saw the bear charging, he turned to run. But the bear reached him in seconds, knocked him down, and tried to turn him over. It chomped through his knee and bit out his inner thigh. When the bear flipped him to his back, Hensley stuck his gun crossways in its mouth to keep it from reaching his head and throat, and the gun broke one of the bear's canine teeth and its jawbone. When the maddened creature wrenched the gun out of his hands, Hensley put his left forearm into the bear's mouth in an effort to protect his face.</p>
<p class="p1">Nearby, Cass and his son-in-law watched in horror.</p>
<p class="p1">"I look at my son-in-law and say, "Oh my f***iing god,'" Cass recalls. "We went over there and started beating the bear on the head to get him off Thurman.</p>
<p class="p1">"I was hitting that bear with everything I had," says Cass, 47, a weightlifter. "I beat and beat and beat on that bear. It broke my gun all to pieces."</p>
<p class="p1">When Hensley couldn't free his arm, he headbutted the bear, breaking his own nose in the process. He then grabbed its mouth with his right hand. The bear's teeth ripped through his tendons, and nearly tore his hand in half.<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp; </span>Cass and Barton kept bashing their guns over its head, but the bear seemed oblivious to their assault and continued mauling Hensley.</p>
<p class="p1">"You could hear popping bones and just crushing," says Cass, "like he was chewing a big old bone."</p>
<p class="p1">The bear finally turned its attention to Hensley's rescuers and chased them down a hill. But, weakened by blood loss, it finally retreated uphill into a stand of mountain laurel.</p>
<p class="p1">Cass and Barton went back up the hill to try to rescue Hensley.</p>
<p class="p1">"You could see his skull, the front of his forehead," Cass recalls. "He had a hunting suit saturated with blood like a sponge&#8211; I thought he was going to bleed to death."<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span></p>
<p class="p1">But before Cass could help the still-conscious Hensley, the bear returned once more, and Cass and Barton ran, with the bear in close pursuit.</p>
<p class="p1">With the bear distracted, Hensley&#8211; despite his massive injuries&#8211; rolled into a nearby patch of mountain laurel. And when the bear returned to him, the scent of the blood on the ground where they'd fought&#8211; his own and the bear's&#8211; may have confused it, and it lumbered away.</p>
<p class="p1">Hensley managed to get to his feet and stumble down the mountain to find Cass.</p>
<p class="p1">"It was almost like the walking dead," says Cass, stunned to see Hensley upright and moving. "It's hard to explain how bad it really was."</p>
<p class="p1">Cass had radioed his son to go get the four wheeler and call for help. The men loaded Hensley, who was rapidly going into shock, onto the four-wheeler and raced to Cass' house. There, thanks to Cass' son who'd made the call, the rescue helicopter ambulance Pegasus was waiting to carry him to UVA Hospital.</p>
<p class="p2">&nbsp;</p>
<p class="p1"><strong>Deja vu</strong></p>
<p class="p1">In his nearly 50 years of hunting, Hensley has had numerous hunting mishaps.</p>
<p class="p1">In the early 1980s, a friend mistook him for a turkey and peppered his upper body, including his face, with buckshot. A few years ago, he fell from a tree stand and broke his back. He once got lost in a blizzard in Montana and had to hike 30 miles to find help. And on two other occasions, he was attacked by bears&#8211; one, an angry mother protecting her cubs, and the other a male trying to pull Hensley down out of his tree stand. He escaped injury both those times.</p>
<p class="p1">This time was different.</p>
<p class="p1">At home making stew on the morning of Hensley's attack, Jennifer says, she initially laughed off Cass' call as a prank. "They're always pulling stuff like that," she says. When she asked Cass how big the bear was and he told her more than 600 pounds, she hung up on him. "Yeah, right," she thought.</p>
<p class="p1">But when Cass' son-in-law called back a few minutes later, his voice shaking, she realized this time was different and raced over Afton Mountain. Hensleys' daughter, Shea Willis, also soon realized the seriousness of her father's situation. "The word 'airlifted' knocked the wind out of me," she says.</p>
<p class="p1">Arriving at UVA Hospital's emergency room, Willis, 39, says she couldn't believe what she saw. "The room was covered in blood. He was <em>tore</em> up."<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span></p>
<p class="p1">Hensley was wheeled into surgery while family and friends filled the waiting room, anxiety rising during the seven-hour life-saving procedures. "They couldn't tell us the extent of the damage," says Willis. "We didn't know if he'd come out with all his limbs, if he had head, neck, or brain injuries or what."</p>
<p class="p1">For about three weeks "it was touch and go," says Willis. Doctors told the family that Hensley might suffer organ failure. Jennifer Hensley says that from the moment she arrived at the ER, she began administering the eastern medicine techniques she practices. "I started cranking the Qi into him because he looked like he needed it," she says. She and Hensley believe the combination of eastern and western medicine allowed him to recover more quickly than doctors ever expected.<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span></p>
<p class="p1">There were setbacks, however. Hensley's femoral artery burst in the week after the attack, and he almost bled to death, says Willis. Amazingly, despite the bear having bitten through bones, Hensley never contracted a systemic infection, which can be fatal. But doctors frequently had to cut away dead or infected flesh from inside his wounds. Remembering the pain of those procedures, Hensley now shakes his head and says, "You just don't know...."</p>
<p class="p1">Two weeks and over a dozen surgeries after the attack, Hensley went home to finish healing. But in some ways, says Willis, the next two months were tougher on everyone than the early days.</p>
<p class="p1">"Learning to live with something long term has been a lot harder," she says, "than walking into the ER and seeing him in little pieces."</p>
<p class="p2">&nbsp;</p>
<p class="p1"><strong>Sympathy and anger</strong></p>
<p class="p1">Though the Hensleys say that in the months since the incident, they've received tremendous support from friends and strangers, they've also dealt with negative comments and criticism. Initial media accounts of the attack alleged that Hensley approached the bear thinking it was dead. Jennifer recalls in particular a blog post on ESPN.com that made light of the incident: "Memo to all muzzle-loading rifle hunters: Before approaching a 600-pound black bear you've just shot, it might be a good idea to reload your gun."<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span></p>
<p class="p1">"It made him sound like an idiot," Jennifer complains.</p>
<p class="p1">Willis also resents people making assumptions about her father.</p>
<p class="p1">"The most important thing to me is that people understand that it wasn't stupidity that got him in this spot," says Willis. "It wasn't inexperience, and he wasn't looking for a thrill."<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span></p>
<p class="p1">Other comments were vitriolic, however. Some anonymous letters expressed disappointment that the bear hadn't, well, finished the job. While most mainstream hunting foes regret the harm that came to Hensley, they express sorrow that anyone would want to destroy such a magnificent creature.</p>
<p class="p1">"Here I look at it as a thing of beauty in the woods," says wildlife rehabilliator Suzanne Whedon. "Hunters come in and see it as a target. They need to be treated with respect."</p>
<p class="p1">Willis comes quickly to her father's defense.</p>
<p class="p1">"My dad has a lot of respect for these animals," she says. "He knew it was up there, and he felt it's the time to take this animal down. He could have let it die somewhere afer he'd shot it, but he'd never do that in a million years. A man of lesser character probably would have, because the thing was huge."</p>
<p class="p2">&nbsp;</p>
<p class="p1"><strong>Bear demons</strong></p>
<p class="p1">Anyone who wondered whether Hensley would ever hunt again got an answer almost immediately. Two weeks after he returned home, Hensley was back out in the woods hunting deer.</p>
<p class="p1">"The mountains are his life," says Willis.</p>
<p class="p1">But he's haunted by the attack. "It sounded like it was tearing my arm off. I could feel everything," says Hensley, dismissing rumors that adrenaline cloaks the pain. He's had nightmares, and little things can revive the terror.</p>
<p class="p1">"He can't stand hearing the dog chewing on a bone," says Jennifer, who removed a painting of a large bear head from above their bed.</p>
<p class="p1">In addition to his gratitude to the teams of doctors and nurses who saved his life, Hensley says he's indebted to Cass and his son-in-law, who beat the bear away from him. "Those two boys saved my life," he says. Jennifer says she hasn't figured out how to show her appreciation. "What do you say, "Thanks for saving my husband's life?" It doesn't seem like enough.</p>
<p class="p1">Though the psychological scars may take longer, Hensley's physical recovery has surpassed anyone's expectations, Jennifer says&#8211; everyone's except his own. "I had no intention of losing this leg," he says. "Every day I said I was going to do something different."<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span></p>
<p class="p1">He still undergoes physical therapy several times a week, and is now able to walk without a cane. He says he has regained 80 percent use of his hand and 50 percent of use of his leg. He stopped taking powerful prescription painkillers, but numbness still lingers along his head where the bear nearly scalped him.</p>
<p class="p1">Though the wound on his inner thigh is still healing and may need to be operated on again in the near future, Hensley's optimistic about his hunting future. He's planned an expedition to Wyoming in September to hunt elk, and when asked if he'll go after another bear, he doesn't hesitate: "Absolutely," he says.</p>
<p class="p1">But he'll be better prepared. On the day of his attack, Hensley had a folding knife in his pocket, and during the attack he could reach it, but he couldn't open it. From now on, he says, he'll carry a straight blade. And he'll make sure he has plenty of ammo at all times.<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span></p>
<p class="p1">Though the bear's head was sent to Richmond for rabies testing, the hide was preserved, but, "I haven't been ready to see it yet," he says.<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span></p>
<p class="p1">One thing he and Jennifer regret: that the bear's meat went to waste because they were too focused on Hensley's injuries to ensure it was properly cut and stored. It's the first time they haven't used the meat from an animal they have killed, and it saddens both.</p>
<p class="p1">As for the fact that the bear nearly took his life, Hensley isn't angry.<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span></p>
<p class="p1">"It was just doing what a bear does," he says.</p>
<p class="p1"><strong><img src="/images/issues/2007/0610/cover-Hensley.jpg" border="0" /><br /> Thurman Hensley<br /> PHOTO BY JEN FARIELLO</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><strong><strong><img src="/images/issues/2007/0610/cover-thurmAndJen.jpg" border="0" /><br /> High school sweethearts, Thurman and Jennifer Hensley are both dedicated to nature<br /> PHOTO BY JEN FARIELLO</strong></strong></p>
<p class="p1"><strong><strong><strong><img src="/images/issues/2007/0610/cover-Hensleyrifle.jpg" border="0" /><br /> Before retiring from Dupont, Hensley did shift work for more than 30 years to make time for his passion: hunting<br /> PHOTO BY JEN FARIELLO</strong></strong></strong></p>
<p class="p1"><strong><strong><strong><strong><img src="/images/issues/2007/0610/cover-hensleyhouse.jpg" border="0" /><br /> Wildlife, including bears, make their homes around the house the Henley's built nearly 30 years ago on 250 acres abutting the Shenandoah National Park near Grottoes.<br /> PHOTO BY JEN FARIELLO</strong></strong></strong></strong></p>
<p class="p1"><strong><strong><strong><strong><strong><img src="/images/issues/2007/0610/cover-bear.jpg" border="0" /><br /> At an estimated 600 pounds, the black bear Hensley battled was about three times the size of the average adult black bear.<br /> PHOTO COURTESY THURMAN HENSLEY</strong></strong></strong></strong></strong></p>
<p class="p1"><strong><strong><strong><strong><strong>#</strong></strong></strong></strong></strong></p>
http://www.readthehook.com/85446/cover-survivor-man-meets-600-pound-black-bear#comments_BreakingNewsbearsCover StoriesWed, 02 Feb 2011 08:52:19 +0000admin85446 at http://www.readthehook.com